#SB50 For Agencies: How to Organize a Winning Campaign

Super Bowl 50 kicks off in just 13 days. For many of the nation’s top marketing agencies, this is crunch time. For agencies who will pre-launch their campaign— an increasingly popular tactic among Super Bowl advertisers— the clock is ticking even faster. In short, it’s time to get things done… fast.

Thankfully, there’s still time to put the finishing touches on your athlete social media campaign. In part one of our Super Bowl For Agencies series, I outlined the necessary steps to secure the athletes for your campaign.

In this second installment, I’d like to discuss the needs and challenges associated with building an organized, ready-to-activate social media campaign. By this stage, you should have already secured the involvement from the athletes you want to activate. Now, rather than arbitrarily scheduling the athlete’s messaging with cookie cutter content, this phase will allow you to formulate a strategy that maximizes your marketing dollars.

OUTLINE YOUR PLAN

Whether you have one athlete participating in your campaign or 100, it is important to consider content, timing, and, if applicable, interaction with other athletes or brand accounts. Go back to your initial strategy and goals— understand what you want the athlete campaign to accomplish and allow your campaign plan to reflect that. Your objectives will impact each piece of content, media, and activation timing.

Athletes provide some of the strongest influence on social media, but their effectiveness is only as strong as your content and execution.

CREATE AUTHENTIC CONTENT

The first step to creating great content is to understand the athlete who will be sharing it. Rather than sharing the standard brand messaging, utilize the athlete’s voice. Spend some time reviewing the athlete’s connection to their audience. Find out what messages receive high, positive engagement. Once you understand how the athlete’s audience reacts to their social media behaviors, you’ll be more equipped to create an effective and authentic message.

The reality is that today’s consumers understand that athletes endorse brands on social media. Tricking them into thinking that a sponsored exchange is entirely organic is not likely to work. Instead, embrace the sponsored message with authenticity. Make the messaging reflect the athlete’s involvement while maintaining their personal voice.

Content Checklist Examples:
☐Is the message authentic to the athlete that will sharing it?
☐Does the content fit what is needed to achieve campaign goals?
☐Is the media prepared and ready to share?

SCHEDULE EXECUTION

At this point you’ve got your campaign-perfect copy tee’d up and ready to be distributed. Next, you’ll need to earn content approval from the athletes you’ve selected and schedule their posts accordingly. As with each step of the campaign process, if a small number of messages and athletes are involved, this process shouldn’t be that difficult. Just make sure you stay in communication with all parties involved. Even the easiest activations will likely require some back and forth content approval, as well as trusting your athlete or their agent to understand and remember the content schedule.

If the campaign involves multiple athletes, posts, or timed-interactions between different athletes and the brand, an automated solution may be necessary. This is where opendorse can help. Our processes and activation software ensures that no deal is too large. In fact, we have organized and activated athlete social media campaigns with messages from over 70 athletes in under a week’s time.

Here is our approach for getting content approved and scheduled:
– The marketer sends content (via. opendorse) to the athlete and agent for approval.
– The marketer is notified (via. alert email) the instant the content is approved or denied.
– The marketer has the ability to edit, update, and re-send content for approval if it is denied.
– The marketer can easily schedule interaction between the athlete and other athletes or brand accounts.
– The marketer can scheduled out approved content to be automatically shared at any desired time.